Pioneer DEH-P8600MP Car CD / MP3 Player

I just recently decided to upgrade my excellent alpine cda-9811 to this pioneer, which has turned out to be a great change. But lets start from the beginning, i purchased this head from best buy so that i could get the waranty they offered, and instead of having them install if for me, i decided to install it my self. It was not a hard task but i was surprised to find out that they do not use the universal plug that many companies such as alpine use. They just give you a bunch of labled wires comming out the back and let you do the cutting and twising and taping into the car. It was prety easy, but for those of you who want to save a little money and buy it online, make sure you know how to install it... So, once i got it installed i turned it on and was a little dissapointed at the sound quality. I decided to plug in the included microphone and run the automatic setup. One word, Horrible. It turned the sub way too high and messed around with other frequencies in the equalizer that did not sound good. But what it did get correct was the delay timing, which is a great feature. To get the sound correct i sat in the car for a few hours tuning all the equalizers and other setting. But once i was finished it blew away the old Apline that i had just because of all the different setting and sound tones that it could produce, such as easy switching from vocal to natural to super bass to customized equalizer... Also another great feature was the independent front/ rear/ sub cross-over setting. I was able to take out the annoying low bas rattle that happened in my rear speakers, while still letting the front speakers blast out the mid-low bass. And as for the subwoofer, well it cut out the higher frequencies which produce a better sounding low bass line. But over all i would have to say that this head has been a great upgrade and i love how adjustable it is.
The only two downsides that i could find on this head were that the range of the remote is very short since it only uses 1 small circular battery such as those used in laser pointers and so on... and also that the screen only displays 3 colors. While it does a great job blending these three colors together to produce images, it is still not a high quality tv looking image. But really, you need to ask yourself what is the purpose for this car? Is it to show a really flashy crystal clear picture or is it to produce great sound. If you decide the first is more important go purchase a fold out 7 inch screen that will play dvds, (and pay hundreds more). But if you decide that you want to be able to have your sub blast our those heart rattling lows, and have the tweeters make the crystal clear highs, while at the same time getting great graphics, go with this head.

Bottom line: To get this head to produce amazing sound quality as it can, it needs to be tuned perfectly to your system. It is not a super hard task, but does take some time and a bit of knowledge about car audio.